Peony
by electric caterpillar
Summary: rated m for future content, written for the prompt "ageswap." Hirano's cupidity.


Named for Paeon, student of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, thought to be the hiding place of a dishonorable nymph, a large, fragrant flower, ranging from red to white, representing in the language of the flowers elegance in Chinese, happy marriage in Japanese, and shame in Victorian English.

* * *

Hirano was not a bad man. He did not hurt any one. He obeyed the law. He obeyed his mother and father, generally.

They asked him together to find a job or something to do outside their home when he was twenty four, and he did. It was the subject of some comment that the only child of such affluent people as his parents would work at a nowhere convenience store, scanning groceries.

They asked him to look for a woman, for a wife to make a home with, and he pretended to be doing so.

But Hirano had fallen in love, already, one simmering summer afternoon when he was a junior in high school, hiding from other boys in the meadow glen deep in the park wilds with busted knees which vomited bright hot blood, when before him appeared that angelically beautiful child, so fair, as pale as the blushing centers of stone fruit flowers which fill the world for several spare days in the spring, with wildflowers and bouquets of red bows in her hair.

Tears blossomed on her cheeks with sympathy for him. She sat by him on the earth and patted his hand - the audacity of that tiny child awe-inspiring, even now, her compassion, the nectar of her amazing essential sweetness.

Out of her little school bag - it was decorated with a pattern of kittens, Hirano recalled, black and white and tabby striped with red ribbons on their tails - she found her own little handkerchief, with which she inexpertly cleaned the ragged wounds, infecting the sweet bride-white lace with his evil black blood, and bandages, which she applied to him with her own minuscule clumsy sticky fingers.

She smiled that unearthly smile which thinned the freckles on her rotund pink cheeks, which turned up the lush calligraphy of her ludicrously long black eyelashes. She put a butterscotch candy wrapped in shiny cellophane in his hand. She said to him in her baby soprano like the first string of an instrument trod upon by a butterfly, "it's okay, it's okay, it's okay."

Why did Hirano elect to work in that ugly little store, lifting boxes, swiping cards, being belittled?

Because every morning he got to watch Marikawa Shizuka scurry to school with her bag pressed to her loping breasts and the tendrils of the waking sun and the winter mists shining in her long, long hair, making a mantle like a saint's falling beneath her nubile bottom, every afternoon, Marikawa Shizuka arm in arm with any of her hoard of stupidly giggling pet friends, her beautiful, beautiful, beautiful fingers, tipped in salmon or scarlet or any shade of fuchsia touching their short coarse hair, their vicious grins, their hips, their hands, Marikawa Shizuka, leaning on the glass of the storefront to pull the gauze of her stocking up her blond thigh, Marikawa Shizuka, tossing her hair over her shoulder to comb it with her fingers, tipping up her white slip of chin to check the weather, nibbling in her rabbitish habit the very tip of the thin nail of her thumb, and whenever she caught his eye, the hoary sybarite huddled in the cold chemical glow of the light bulb building staring out at her beauty which astonished him every day of his life, she would smile at him, Marikawa Shizuka.

His room was a shrine above the gun locker in posters and expensive small plastic figures to youth, to femininity, characters kind-eyed with very long hair. He had a box under his bed of books filled with his brutal renderings, tender tomes which read like a visual history of Marikawa Shizuka from age six to sixteen, the day she astonished him by appearing with hair yellow as the translucent tail of a goldfish, the explosive burgeoning in a season of her very large breasts, every necklace and bracelet she owned, every way she ever wore her hair.

He knew where she lived, the apartment number, the room, the corner where she lay her head. He might have more. He might have her underthings, locks of her fragrant hair, the pits of peaches which had been nursed clean in hot nexus of her sweet pink mouth, but he loved her, really, really loved her, he told himself, much too much to frighten her, to be unkind to her.

He had once held in his very hand a plush kitten and bell which had fallen off her phone as she scurried late to school in her first year of high school, hitting the pavement before the store with a merry ring which sounded still in the front of his skull.

He left work. He was almost fired. He traveled up the road to Marikawa Shizuka's apartment building and sat for a long time on the bus bench in front of it, cuddling the kitten she left for him in both his fists tucked tightly beneath his chin and looking at the window of her home, over which clouds drowsed in the electric blue of day ripening like fruit into green and pink and orange and violet, until the window was a herald parting the dark, towards which Marikawa Shizuka singing an insipid pop song made lovely by the blessing of her voice at eight thirty in the evening ascended in the atmosphere altered by her beauty.

He dared not enter the building. He left the kitten on the box which contained the mechanism for hailing apartments.

He had stayed out all that night, wandering aimlessly in the alley bowels of the town, almost dreaming, late into the morning of the following day, when he shucked his shoes and stood at the edge of the roof of some complex very high in the soft spring sky and cried as hard as he had ever cried as an infant frightened by the hungers of his human body.

He loved Marikawa Shizuka so much, so deeply, he would certainly die.


End file.
